A Step Ahead

On Saturday at 1 P.M., at the Cedar Lake Theatre, The New Yorker’s dance critic, Joan Acocella, will talk with Alexei Ratmansky, the Bolshoi-trained dancer and choreographer, whom she profiled in our June 23, 2008, issue.

Ratmansky, 39, is currently serving out the end of his four-year contract as the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, after which he will move to New York. For a while it was thought that he would take the post of resident choreographer at the New York City Ballet, for which he has made two very successful ballets. Instead, to the surprise of many, it was announced last month that he will become artist-in-residence at N.Y.C.B.’s neighboring, and sometimes rival, company, the American Ballet Theatre.

Ratmansky’s directorship of the Bolshoi was not a serene period, for him or for the company. Having spent most of his performing career in Europe and North America, he wanted to introduce Western ballets to the Bolshoi, whose dancers were still wedded to a Soviet style. Acocella writes:

Ratmansky…began acquiring Western repertory: works by George Balanchine, Léonide Massine, John Neumeier, Flemming Flindt, Christopher Wheeldon, Twyla Tharp. A number of the company’s stars did not want to do these peculiar ballets, and wouldn’t try, so Ratmansky began featuring younger dancers who did want to try—a violation of hierarchy that made him even less popular. He has said that his administrative duties (by which he probably means a good many fights as well) took up more than two-thirds of his time. He was now an internationally respected choreographer, but he had little opportunity to choreograph. His contract with the Bolshoi ran through 2008. He did not seek to renew it.

Ratmansky’s “Middle Duet,” made for the Kirov Ballet, in 1998, is a good example of Ratmansky’s modernist take on ballet classicism.

The duet starts blunt, angular, and reticent, with the woman’s back to us. As it progresses, it becomes more elaborate, extended (bigger arabesques, higher lifts), and more intimate (closer partnering). In the end, we’re not sure what is happening between these two people, but something is clearly going on. The piece is richly ambiguous, like most good ballets.